Putting Paradise on two pages

Yes, now we are moving on with the coming children´s pages for the YWAM magazine. The planning has take some longer than I expected. This time we want to put the lyrics of one of our songs over both the children´s pages. The song is about paradise and the fall of man. About that Jesus is the only one that can take away sin from us, and how we can live for him because of that.

These are all very big topics to squeeze on two pages. And it is my job to make all of this look attractive. And to have the children and families learn about this through different activities. I really like to do and make puzzles and mazes, and am very happy that I can put them on our children´s pages.

Some things that are a challenge with this job is that the whole things does not get messy. The children should always be able to know where to start and what goes where on a puzzle page. At the same time as I want to put lots of puzzles in there and are challenging myself to integrate puzzles in the text and in the background. Sometimes it is harder to come up with simple solutions than with complex ones. For us this meant that we have made the song text as visible as possible and let the puzzles lie around it. This way the children can easily follow back and forth from the text to the activities.

I really would like the children to get the message we put on our pages, instead of just doing our puzzles. There is more to it than just making puzzles about bible stories. Here we think it works really well to integrate the puzzles with the message. To have one topic per page or pages. And let everything be about this topic. For example the garden of eden.

The garden of eden is a thing we are currently working with. It is actually very nice to work with, lots of trees and plants and animals. And it is big, so then you can do lots of things. Everything needs to be done by the first of November, so now there is a lot of drawing left to do.

In two days my parents will come and visit me here at the base. I am really looking forward to having them here. My birthday is on friday.